


Like a Purple Gorilla

by orphan_account



Category: The Good Doctor (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - some people live and nobody dies, F/M, Gen, Half-Sibling Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-12 19:54:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12967194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Steve moves to San Jose when he can’t stand Manhattan, Kansas any longer.





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! 
> 
> This fic is a canon-divergence where Steve Murphy is Shaun's half-sibling, and was adopted to a different family as a child. They meet at St. Bonaventure when they're adults, and end up entering into a romantic relationship without either being aware (for a while) that they might be related. If that does not float your boat, you should definitely not read any further.
> 
> On a different note, I admire and enjoy The Good Doctor in a lot of ways, but found Steve's character pretty cheesy/underdeveloped. So this is my exploration of how things could've gone in a different direction.

Steve moves to San Jose when he can’t stand Manhattan, Kansas any longer. It’s not so much a destination as where he just ends up. He stumbles off the Greyhound bus into a relentless sunshine that pours down from the sky and bounces off the streets, gilding everything in gold. The air smells like sizzling meat and about five different kinds of fruit. Steve decides to stay for a while.

 

He spends a month as a waiter at Zola, whiles away nearly a year at Baumé where the tips cover his rent and the pay goes toward a checking and savings account Steve’s still figuring out what to do with. Here in Cali, folks fall all over his faint Midwestern accent, and so he plays it up at work, tells the joke about not growing up in a cornfield, but next to one, and people like that. They like him. Sometimes they also like Steve out of the restaurant and in their beds, but that’s not the point.

 

The point is that the commute to Palo Alto is kind of unsustainable, and the salads guy knows a guy who knows a lady who hooks Steve up with a security services firm that’s hiring downtown. Thanks to the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks, and Tourism’s school outreach program, Steve’s actually a decent shot and can skin deer. At San Jose St. Bonaventure Hospital, this translates into using a taser every six months for quality assurance training, and helping out the baby doctors when the vending machine in Surgery gets stuck again at 3am.

 

“Aren’t you supposed to be setting a good example for patients?” he asks Claire Browne.

 

“I’m going to be a surgeon, not an internist,” she shoots back. “And I need those chips right now.”

 

“I can’t believe I’m probably going to have to get cut open by one of you people someday,” Steve sighs. But he looks down the hall anyway, decides the coast is clear, and executes a swift kick to the front of the vending machine that finally jostles her Doritos free.

 

“ _Thank you,_ ” Claire sighs, tearing the packet open and devouring its contents with an eagerness that should probably set off ten labor law alarm bells but won’t. “I owe you.”

 

“Four bags of chips, two Snickers bars, Amos cookies, and a lot of peanut butter crackers.”

 

“You’re making that up.”

 

“I actually have a tab open for all the residents.”

 

Claire waves dismissively. “When I start making that 400K a year, you can have all the junk food you want, baby.”

 

“Browne!” They both jump, and Claire looks guiltily back at Melendez, who Steve is constitutionally unable to think the name of without adding _that dick_ immediately afterwards. “Go find Murphy, and meet me by the nurse's station.” Then he retreats behind the corner again.

 

Steve whistles. “Good luck.”

 

“It’s fine,” Claire says. “I’ve had food now.”

 

“Is Murphy a guy or a girl? I saw a redhead walk through a couple minutes ago.”

 

“He’s a guy, one of the new interns. Tall, brown hair, blue eyes. Baby face. He’s- ” Claire hesitates, then sighs. “Anyway, I’m gonna go. Thanks again.”

 

“Anytime,” Steve says. “Though I am planning to cash in on that 400K a year eventually.”

 

“You’re lucky you’re pretty,” she calls over her shoulder.

 

“I would make an excellent trophy husband,” Steve agrees. 

 

*

 

He figures out what Claire didn’t end up saying a week later, when he spots an intern with a thousand-yard stare standing in front of the same vending machine.


	2. 2

He figures out what Claire didn’t end up saying a week later, when he spots an intern with a thousand-yard stare standing in front of the same vending machine.

 

Everybody on the security team has to complete a training module on clinician burnout and _recognizing the signs;_ Bonaventure has a whole system for dealing with it. As a guy who walks around all hours of the night checking up on quiet spots in the hospital, Steve has referred a couple staff for “follow-up”. Personally the idea of talking therapy with a stranger who’s paid to be kind gives him hives, but he’s not about to have some overworked, clinically depressed doctor on his conscience.

 

The thermos is lime green. Steve got it for free at a pop-up market on Santana Row, and now he holds it out to the intern.

 

“You look like you could use this.”

 

He gets a startled, wild-eyed stare in response. Poor kid - though he’s probably older than Steve - must be on his 28th hour. He continues, “I’d offer you coffee, but some of the other residents say it makes them too jittery. So, sugar.”

 

Some of the lost haze clears from the intern’s expression. “Gluck et al. 2001,” he says.His voice has an odd, but pleasant lilt. “Night eating syndrome is associated with depression, low self-esteem, reduced daytime hunger, and less weight loss in obese outpatients."

 

Ugh, doctors. “Hey man,” Steve points out, “you were the one looking at a case full of processed snacks.”

 

“Sometimes they have pretzels.”

 

Steve kind of believes him. He’s got a face you want to like immediately, eyes clear and polished like sea glass, tilted shyly down at the corners.

 

“Just take the drink dude,” Steve says. This time, the intern obeys, long fingers wrapping carefully around the column of the thermos. He shivers a little at the sudden chill of metal, but closes his eyes gratifyingly once he takes a sip of what’s inside.

 

“This is very good. Is this from the canteen?”

 

Steve snorts. “No, I make it myself.” The machines in the canteen dispense what could reasonably be called lukewarm dyed water, color customizable depending on whether you want tea, coffee, or hot chocolate. What Steve brings from home is rich and creamy, made from good cocoa with a twist of chestnut. He likes to drink it when he checks the rooftop, the city sprawled out below for miles like a hyper-bright constellation.

 

“Do you make it for yourself or for others?”

 

“Uh, mostly for me I guess.”

 

The intern takes another sip and nods stiltedly. “I’m not a medico-legal liability to the hospital. You can leave now.”

 

Jesus. Steve grins. “Maybe I just want to make sure you’re not going to run off with my thermos,” he teases. 

 

The intern frowns. He stops drinking, twists the cap on with quick, precise movements, and tries to press the thermos into Steve’s hands.

 

“Whoa whoa whoa,” Steve protests, pressing the thermos right back. “I’m kidding. It was a freebie. Keep it if you want; I’ve got a bunch at home.”

 

“You were using sarcasm.”

 

“Yeah. Sorry, I was just.” Now Steve’s feeling kind of like the dicks who used to talk extra slow to Junie Goodman on the playground. “Trying to be funny.”

 

The intern nods, eyes skittering away from Steve’s face and refocusing on the floor; Steve gets the uncanny impression that the guy is filing away this factoid into a neat mental library for future cross-reference. “Your hair looks ridiculous," the intern says all of a sudden, completely deadpan.

 

Steve opens his mouth. Runs a hand weakly through the tousled side part he’s been trying out to spice up his morning routine. “Hey, I put a lot of time and effort into this look.”

 

“Is _that_ sarcasm?” The intern cocks his head, serious as a heart attack, and before Steve realizes that he just been epically roasted, the guy’s pager goes off and Melendez - that dick - sticks hischiseled face out of a conference room to say, “Murphy. Got an update on the gymnast’s MRI yet?”, and the intern shuffles away, still clutching Steve’s green thermos and with a halting “Thank you” as he goes.

 

Steve thinks about it for the rest of his shift. Carries the strange cadence of the intern’s voice, his elastic expressions, like a lodestone in the pit of his stomach.

 

He’s still thinking about it the next afternoon, when he arrives at the hospital and asks his supervisor whether the incident is worth reporting to Health and Wellbeing.

 

“Thing is, I forgot to get his name.”

 

“He was with Dr. Melendez, new surgical resident, talks like a nervous kid?

 

“Yeah, I guess.”

 

“Then you don’t need to worry,” his boss dismisses. “The guy’s autistic, so it can’t be helped if he just zones out sometimes.”

 

“Uh huh.”

 

“I know, I was surprised when I heard he was hired too. But, here, apparently he helped save a kid’s life before he even started training. It’s on Youtube and everything.” She pulls out her phone, and that’s how Steve ends up watching a grainy cell phone clip of Dr. Shaun Murphy, surgical resident at San Jose St. Bonaventure hospital, performing lifesaving cowboy surgery on a boy suffering from a pneumothorax using 2 handles of 150-proof bourbon and a pocketknife. _Cool._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and feedback, as always, are much loved and very helpful <3


	3. Chapter 3

October turns out to be the month of dating Hot Junior Partner. Technically, he goes by Tyler and his last name is hyphenated, but HJP is the nickname Steve uses when making small talk with his co-workers and the clinicians he’s on first-name basis with.

 

“So you guys getting serious?” Jared Kalu asks when they run into each other by the water fountain. He’s got dark smudges under his eyes; it’s a gross miscarriage of justice that someone with dark smudges under their eyes can still have his ridiculous body and ridiculous face.

 

“I’m not giving you relationship advice,” Steve warns.

 

Jared raises an eyebrow. “Don’t think I asked for any,” he says loftily.

 

That’s adorable. Steve isn’t the one being used by the cutest female resident in Surgery for her carnal needs. “It’s getting there,” he sighs. “We go on dates, we’ve made dinner together a couple times, and he stays over almost every night.”

 

Actually, HJP takes him out to the San Francisco Theater once a week before they go back to his condo and have sex. But discretion is the better part of valor, especially when it causes Jared Kalu to stalk off in a jealous sulk.

 

The other thing that happens in October is that Steve runs into Claire’s other buddy seemingly at random. The next few times Steve sees Shaun Murphy, the baby doctor is:

 

1) Getting scolded by a patient

2) Getting scolded by Melendez, that dick

3) Sitting dazedly on a bench outside St. Bonaventure, hair mired in cowlicks and clearly fresh off the hellish graveyard shift that was Trauma last night

 

Post-8am, Steve’s aspirations are usually to go a diner, go home, work out, shower, and pass out until late afternoon. He tries hard to avoid eye contact and keep walking toward the bus stop across the street. Unfortunately, it turns out that you can take a boy out of the Midwest, but you cannot take the internalized need to politely mind strangers’ business out of the boy.

 

“Hey, heard you had a crazy night last night,” he says, tugging the zipper of his fleece higher and shoving his hands into his pockets.

 

Dr. Murphy inclines his head. “I made a reboa.”

 

“That sounds pretty cool.”

 

“It’s a surgical balloon that occludes blood flow; helps prevent bleeding out until the damage can be repaired.”

 

“ _Very_ cool.”

 

A pause. “Are you teasing me, or making fun of me?”

 

Steve blinks. “Neither. Just wanted to say congratulations on your first Trauma shift, especially given how…rough it must have been.” And then, because he can’t help himself, and because maybe he _is_ kind of curious about this guy who saves lives using bourbon bottles and penknives and balloons, Steve adds, “So, how do you make a reboa?”

 

Fifteen minutes later, he’s mired in a discussion that’s probably making him look like an idiot - “Hold up,” Sean asks, “So the aorta takes blood to or away from the heart?” - when Dr. Murphy suddenly stiffens and clams up. Frowning, Steve turns around, and almost jumps out of his skin when he sees who it is.

 

“Dr. Glassman!”

 

Aaron Glassman is everyone’s idea of a good doctor; silver-rimmed glasses perched over a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and an intense, fathomless gaze that’s plastered over several buses in the city promoting St. Bonaventure Hospital. He also holds a sweet holiday shindig at the end of every year for all staff; last time, Steve woke up next to an oncologist who’s now in New Jersey doing a fellowship, tinsel inexplicably in her underwear and Twizzlers inexplicably in his. Glassman doesn’t know Steve from a hole in the ground, but there on that bench he distinctly feels himself getting checked over, appraised, considered.

 

“I don’t think we’ve met before,” he says, sounding tired and unfailingly polite. “What’s your name, son?”

 

“Steve Fairchild sir. I’m on the security team.”

 

“Thank you for all your hard work - us doctors really appreciate it,” Glassman says. He turns to raise a puzzled eyebrow at Dr. Murphy - and just like that, Steve understands that he’s being dismissed.

 

“Good catching up. I’m actually just gonna - head home and crash,” he says awkwardly. Dr. Murphy doesn’t give any indication that he’s even heard, still staring at his shoelaces like they’re the most fascinating thing in this universe. As Steve backs away and crosses the street to the bus stop, he thinks he hears Glassman say something about pancakes. 

 

_What the hell_ , he asks himself on the ride back, while he’s ordering hot and sour soup from the corner Chinese hole-in-the-wall, as he’s lying in bed waiting for the merciful embrace of sleep. Get it together, Fairchild. So Steve goes out with HJP on Saturday and they have a good time at some confusing molecular gastronomy-tapas bar fusion place, get giggly-drunk on pear wine made by Steve’s neighbor from the tree in their communal garden, before Steve finally pushes the guy back onto his nice fitted sheets and rides him hard and puts him away wet. He wakes up on Sunday feeling much refreshed and makes his way over to Santa Clara Street, where he buys a hot dog and sits on a bench. Watches people in every shape and color imaginable dart in and out of the low-slung shopfronts. Eyes the curve of the dusky pink-and-blue mountains in the distance framed between office complexes and long-fronded palm trees. Drinks in the faint scent of saltwater blown over in fresh winds from the bay. Lets the city seduce him again.


	4. Chapter 4

Steve’s parents were always real honest about the fact that he’s adopted. His mom was a bio lab manager at K-State, and when he was younger, he’d been kind of proud of the fact that he hadn’t been like the rest of his classmates, squeezed or cut out of their mother’s stomachs with so much yelling and bodily fluids, conceived during an oops-the-condom-broke moment or thanks to the nonexistence of Kansas sex ed. Steve may as well have been delivered by the stork.

 

When he got a little older, he realized that all of his parents’ friends seemed to have kids twelve or thirteen years ahead than him. And that Steve never seemed to have any punishments, ever. He ate a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches and popsicles because those were his favorite, watched TV on school nights, dog-eared all the beautifully bound old books on the family shelves, and sometimes forgot to text home when he was coming back from baseball practice late - read, getting baked on shitty weed that their shortstop got from his brother. It took a long time to realize that wrangling kids is what parents are _supposed_ to do. That he’d been living on stolen time, a guest in a house that suddenly felt full of new angles and shuttered, secret trapdoors he shouldn’t have opened.

 

On one hand, Steve is aware he’s wrapped in layers and layers of privilege which have been slowly going to waste for years. He was a cute white baby who got adopted by a decent couple who’s own son died in one of those horrific pickup-truck-meets-kid’s-head home accidents you hear about when your aunt shares the article link on Facebook. They’ve never beaten him. They’ve never called him useless or locked him in the basement or closet as punishment. Lots of kids don’t even have that. All Steve’s parents have ever done wrong by him is be too kind, treat him like the moral redemption he’s supposed to be, and not love him as much as their natural-born son — which, who the hell does he think he is anyway?

 

On the other hand, it’s hard loving people who are still hurting for someone else. It’s harder still when they’re good at hiding it.

 

“You know we’ll always be proud of you,” his dad had said Steve’s first winter break back from K State. Well. Technically he was a month early, but nobody was supposed to call it what it was: academic probation. “You can talk to us whenever you feel like you’re up for it.”

 

You don’t get academic probation when the chemistry department is ranked 84th in the nation and your dad brings in 75 percent of its NIH funding. You get a stern warning from the president to stop dealing pot and Adderal to sorority girls and premeds respectively; get it the hell together; and forced time off.

 

So Steve had a good situation in life handed to him and he fucked it up pretty bad. It was embarrassing for his parents, even though they didn’t say so. If he were a better person, this would’ve been the moment when they hugged it out and turned everything around, but Steve’s not good when it counts, has always known that deep down. There’s plenty of selfishness and anger in him. He supposes it must come from his real father or mother, he hopes it does, because otherwise that would mean it’s just him. It closes around his throat like a fist sometimes, that gut-tug of guilt that can rip you open from hip to sternum, but it shakes him out of his spiral long enough to save his parents some grief and get the hell out of Kansas on the furthest bus ticket he can buy.

 

The great thing about California is that it’s a very generous place to be a fuck-up. Steve breathes easier now, even when it’s 9pm and he’s trying to convince an irate mom in the ER that yes, they have PhDs conducting groundbreaking clinical research in immunotherapy on the third floor; no, there has not yet been a vaccine invented that cures the common cold her child has. 

 

“Ma’am,” he says for the sixth time. “That’s not even how vaccines work.”

 

“I want to speak to your manager,” she snaps.

 

Steve slides into November with a nervous exhaustion that crawls under his fingernails and itches behind his eyes. He goes out on half a dozen more sort-of dates with HJP that mutually peter away due to their conflicting schedules, and considers getting a houseplant.A succulent or maybe a jade fern. Nurse Ferreira recommends that he join a book club. Claire recommends dying his hair. Then there’s a rash of gang activity out of Eastside, one upstart OG starts brandishing a fucking _gun_ in the ER, and well. Steve isn’t trying to be a hero; he certainly doesn’t feel like one when the shock starbursts into pain as the bullet tears through his leg. 

 

*

 

“God,” he says involuntarily when he hobbles into his shrink’s office and sees who else is invited to the dog and pony show today. “What happened to you?”

 

Dr. Shaun Murphy turns around in his seat, eyes wide.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To clarify the timeline of events for anyone who's confused: this chapter roughly matches with the events of the last season 1 episode before the finale, and goes into canon divergence from there.

**Author's Note:**

> So I was just innocently watching clips of The Newsroom on Youtube, minding my own business, when for some reason the next clip that auto-plays is from The Good Doctor. From there, Youtube decided I should watch the newest trailers of Bates Motel and Supernatural. Somehow this combo and a profound lack of sleep from finals period crossed all the dirtybadwrong wires in brain, and now I'm writing bits and pieces of a tragiromcom half-incest AU where Steve Murphy is a security guard at St. Bonaventure. The best part? I've still only watched this show on Youtube.
> 
> TGD fandom ppl, hmu and tell me where I follow you at.


End file.
